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A NEW EXPLANATION OF WATERGATE

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It has been 10 years since Richard Nixon, staggering from self-inflicted wounds, retired from the field at Watergate, thereby ending one of the sorriest spectacles in our national experience. But it did not end the episode's exegesis, which has already produced a literature of some 150 volumes.

Now comes Jim Hougan, a free-lance journalist, with the first major attempt at Watergate revisionism. While ''Secret Agenda'' does not alter the broad outlines of the story as we know it, it posits an intriguing subtext in which the Central Intelligence Agency plays an important role. And there are titillating details aplenty: a C.I.A.-sponsored call girl ring; Agency efforts to spy on the White House; the planting of false evidence and an effort by one of the Watergate burglars to sabotage his own enterprise.

If even half of this is true, ''Secret Agenda'' will add an important new dimension to our understanding of Watergate. But it may be months before reporters can sort through this material, check Mr. Hougan's sources and decide which of these revelations is solid gold, which dross.

Here a personal note. To the extent that Mr. Hougan is challenging what he calls the ''received version'' of Watergate, he is challenging me, among others. My book, ''Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years'' (published in 1976), is a detailed history of that era. Mr. Hougan calls it ''an excellent book'' but faults my handling of two specific events. Anyone writing in the heat of a breaking story must expect a second generation of journalists and historians to examine skeptically his account in the light of their own research. I approached Mr. Hougan's book with intense curiosity.

In one respect, ''Secret Agenda'' is immediately rewarding. On the basis of F.B.I. documents, which Mr. Hougan says he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, he is able to shake our faith in one important strand of the received version - that the burglars tapped phones at the Democratic National Committee.

The story generally accepted at the time was that James McCord had installed two taps during the first break-in at the D.N.C. on May 27-28, 1972 - one on the phone of Fay Abel, a secretary to Chairman Larry O'Brien who shared several extensions with him; and a second one on the phone of R. Spencer Oliver, executive director of the Association of Democratic State Chairmen. But when Mr. McCord and his associate, Alfred Baldwin, tried to monitor the taps, they couldn't pick up the Abel-O'Brien tap at all. For the next two weeks, Mr. Baldwin listened in on the Oliver tap, passing summaries of the conversations to G. Gordon Liddy, who was in charge of political espionage for the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP). According to this version, one purpose of the June break-in was to make the Abel-O'Brien tap operational.

But the memorandums Mr. Hougan has obtained show that well into the autumn of 1972 the F.B.I. laboratory was convinced that neither phone had been tapped by the Watergate burglars and that the crude tap recovered from Spencer Oliver's phone on Sept. 13 had been placed by someone else, perhaps by the Democrats themselves, well after the burglars' arrest.

According to the memorandums, this judgment provoked outraged incredulity from United States Attorney Earl Silbert, then preparing the Watergate prosecutions. In a Sept. 28 memo to Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen, Mr. Silbert argued that the F.B.I. was seeking to justify its own ''goof'' in failing to detect the tap during three earlier sweeps. But he recognized that the lab's judgment posed a problem for him. ''Obviously,'' he wrote Mr. Petersen, ''we do not want to be put in the position of challenging such testimony of the FBI, particularly its lab, while at the same time relying so heavily on the FBI in general, and the lab in particular, for other important aspects of our proof.''

Assuming that these documents are authentic, they pose several intriguing questions with which Mr. Hougan does not grapple. Under the Brady rule, prosecutors must turn over any exculpatory evidence - that is, evidence which would tend to show a defendant's innocence - to defense attorneys. Since the Watergate burglars were charged, among other things, with violations of the Federal wiretapping laws, these memorandums would certainly appear to be exculpatory. Did Mr. Silbert turn this evidence over to the defense? If so, why did it never surface? Most curious of all, since the F.B.I. at this time was run by the most malleable of Nixon appointees, L. Patrick Gray, why didn't Mr. Gray go public with the lab's reports, which would certainly have aided the embattled White House and even turned the scandal back on the Democrats?

Nonetheless, these memorandums are important. For we know from several sources that Mr. Baldwin, in his room at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn, was listening to intercepted conversations early in June. If not Oliver's phone, then whose phone was he listening to?

It is here that ''Secret Agenda'' becomes more speculative. The author believes that Mr. Baldwin was listening in on several call girls at the Columbia Plaza Apartments. He does not identify them. But he calls the key one ''Tess'' and suggests that she was connected to a Washington lawyer named Phillip Bailley, who was charged in June 1972 with running a Washington call girl ring.

According to Mr. Hougan, Phillip Bailley's arrest spread ''alarm'' through official Washington because a pair of address books seized from his apartment - and a client list found in a raid on the Columbia Plaza - contained the names of prominent Republicans and Democrats. Mr. Hougan also reports that Phillip Bailley was amorously connected with ''a White House attorney with a penchant for being horsewhipped and an executive secretary on Capitol Hill who was not only beautiful and politically active but more than a little inclined toward voyeurism, sadomasochism and zoophilia.''

This is not the first time that such steamy stuff has surfaced in connection with Watergate. According to John Ehrlichman, the alleged tap on Mr. Oliver's phone recorded him ''phoning his girl friends all over the country lining up assignations.'' I and others reported unconfirmed rumors that the telephone was being used for some sort of call girl service catering to prominent Washingtonians.

But Mr. Hougan has pushed this farther. He suggests that the tap of Tess's phone was indeed intercepting conversations on Mr. Oliver's phone because a D.N.C. secretary was using that phone to introduce visiting Democrats to Tess. Mr. Hougan does not identify the secretary at this point, but later strongly suggests that it was Ida ''Maxie'' Wells, Mr. Oliver's personal secretary, a name that will figure again in his scenario. The tap on Tess's phone, Mr. Hougan says, was placed by Louis Russell (since deceased), a ''drunken, whoring and brutish'' figure who had once been a staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was now working for James McCord's private security firm.

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Like many others who have studied Watergate, Mr. Hougan is skeptical about Mr. McCord's (and E. Howard Hunt's) ''retirement'' from the C.I.A. Therefore, he concludes that Russell too was working for the Agency. Ergo, the taps on the prostitutes' phones - and probably the call girl operation itself - were a C.I.A. project, designed to gather information about the sexual activities of prominent Washingtonians, perhaps for blackmail, perhaps to construct psychological profiles.

At this point, I was still following Mr. Hougan, still intrigued by his interlocking hypotheses. But as he piled premise upon premise, I found myself tottering on a tower of unproven assumptions.

Mr. Hougan tells us that hours after Phillip Bailley's indictment on June 9, Presidential counsel John Dean told the prosecutor to bring the address books to the White House so he could look for names with Administration connections. On June 12, Jeb Magruder, a ranking official of CREEP, ordered Gordon Liddy to undertake another break-in at the Democratic Committee. To Mr. Hougan, the connection is clear: ''All the circumstantial evidence suggests that concerns about the Bailley case led to the June 16 break-in.''

Perhaps - but the evidence is circumstantial indeed. Mr. Hougan relies heavily on Gordon Liddy's version of that June 12 conversation in his book, ''Will.'' According to Mr. Liddy, Mr. Magruder ''swung his left arm back behind him and brought it forward forcefully as he said, 'I want to know what O'Brien's got right here!' At the word here he slapped the lower left part of his desk . . . the place he kept his derogatory information on the Democrats. . . . The purpose of the second Watergate break-in was to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.''

To Mr. Hougan, that could only mean the Democrats' knowledge of Republican connections to the call girl ring. But if that's what Jeb Magruder wanted, why wouldn't he have spelled it out? Would he really have sent his burglars into the Watergate with such a vague mandate?

Moreover, Mr. Magruder's remark could apply just as well to another kind of derogatory information that presumably worried the President's men - knowledge of some shady dealings between Nixon and Howard Hughes, particularly the $100,000 paid to the President's friend, Charles (Bebe) Rebozo. Since Larry O'Brien had served for a year as Hughes's Washington representative, he was in a good position to know about Hughes's dealing with the President. I have long believed that the roots of the Watergate break-in lay in that nexus.

Mr. Hougan concedes that the White House interest in Mr. O'Brien ''clearly reflected Nixon's own worries about his family's past and present ties to industrialist Howard Hughes.'' He seems to believe that concerns about Hughes may well explain the first successful Watergate break-in on May 28 and the two unsuccessful attempts that weekend. It is only the June break-in that Mr. Hougan links to the call girl ring. And here he introduces another bit of new evidence. According to F.B.I. reports, one of the items recovered from Eugenio Martinez after the break-in was the key to Ida Wells's desk.

It is difficult to understand how this information could have failed to surface during the multiple Watergate investigations. Was the evidence intentionally suppressed by the F.B.I.? Or was it merely overlooked by investigators? Given the author's hints that Miss Wells was the D.N.C. contact for the call girl ring, the key is certainly an intriguing piece of the puzzle. But Mr. Hougan claims that it is, ''quite literally, the key to the break- in.''

There are many unanswered questions here. Was Ida Wells's desk really the principal focus of the break-in or merely one of several possible targets? What could she have had in her desk that alone would justify such a risky undertaking? Mr. Hougan keeps hinting that it had something to do with the call girl ring. But since the client list had already surfaced, it is difficult to imagine what other bombshell could have lurked there among the paper clips and Scotch tape. Mr. Hougan is deliberately vague on this point.

The lacuna is particularly important given the capstone the author finally places atop his tower of hypotheses. So critical was the information in Ida Wells's desk, he suggests, that James McCord was desperate to preserve it for the C.I.A.'s ''exclusive consumption.'' So Mr. McCord, with Lou Russell's unspecified help, sabotaged the June break-in, insuring that the police would arrest the burglars, thus preventing this critical information from reaching the White House (and later Lou Russell would place the bogus tap on Spencer Oliver's phone to confuse the investigators and prevent them from stumbling on the real tap of the call girls' phone).

Here Mr. Hougan seems to be stretching his material farther than it will go. Since all the burglars had close ties to the C.I.A., why couldn't Mr. McCord simply have appropriated the materials in Ida Wells's desk and turned them over to the C.I.A. (just as Mr. Hougan suggests Howard Hunt did after the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist)? And wouldn't the arrest of the burglars - particularly since Mr. Martinez was carrying the key - have threatened to expose the very information the C.I.A. was trying to conceal?

Mr. Hougan can be maddeningly elliptical at times, building his case through inference and innuendo. He is less analytical than intuitive. His first book, ''Decadence,'' was a quirky piece of cultural criticism which suggested that America was about to undergo ''an upheaval of historical dimensions, a sundering at the seams.'' His second book, ''Spooks,'' an investigation of the private use of secret agents by multinational corporations, posited a secret history of interlocking conspiracies in America.

In ''Secret Agenda,'' he has presented some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past. But his principal achievement may turn out to be intuitive - a bold imagining of what Watergate was all about.

To his credit, Mr. Hougan does not claim to have written a seamless account. Indeed, he believes that such a history could only emerge from a new commission of inquiry, armed with subpoena powers to compel testimony from reluctant parties. The country may not be in a mood to reopen an investigation now closed for 10 years, but the questions Mr. Hougan has posed here - and some he hasn't - certainly deserve an answer.

J. Anthony Lukas, a pulitzer Prize-winning jounalist, is the author of the forthcoming ''Common Ground.''

A version of this review appears in print on November 11, 1984, on Page 7007007 of the National edition with the headline: A NEW EXPLANATION OF WATERGATE. Today's Paper|Subscribe